Holy Thursday – Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper
(Exodus
12:1-8.11-14; I Corinthians 15:23-26; John 13:1-15)
An American
rabbi writes of a Passover his father, a Polish emigrant, had many years ago. He says that his father had gone to Lithuania
to study in a Hebrew school. However, he
was captured by the Soviets and sent to a workcamp in Siberia. There he and his friends prepared for
Passover while harvesting summer wheat.
They saved a few kernels each day and hid them until the following
spring to make matzoh. They fashioned a rolling
pin from the gears of an old clock and a piece of wood. The pin was used to perforate the matzoh
dough so that it would bake quickly and thoroughly. Then in the middle of a Spring night, the
boys baked the matzoh in a hut with an oven.
On Passover night they came together to fulfill the biblical mandate
that was reiterated in today’s first reading.
They thanked God, the Creator, for His great kindness.
The apostle
Paul tells us in the second reading how Jesus transformed the Passover
supper. He took the unleavened bread,
blessed it, and said that it was his body.
When he blessed the wine and called it his blood, he spoke of a new
covenant between him and his disciples.
The new covenant would supplant the old, not entirely replacing it but
adding substantially to it.
Tonight’s
gospel reveals the difference. At the
anticipated Passover feast in John’s gospel Jesus washes the feet of his
disciples. The gesture is meant to be
symbolic. Jesus tells his disciples that
they are to serve one another as he just served them. In the long discourse
that the foot washing initiates, Jesus further explains himself. His disciples are not only to thank God for
His kindness but are to love one another as radically as he loves them. That is, they must be ready to die for one
another.
Most of us
have difficulty acknowledging much good in others. Some, however, like that police officer killed
in Boulder, Co., last week, have the courage to love radically like Jesus. Tonight we want to pray for him and for the
many loving people we have known in our lives.
Perhaps some of these died in the pandemic this past year. We also should pray for one another and
ourselves that we will emerge from this Easter weekend triumphant with the
Lord. We hope to have Jesus’ Spirit of
love more deeply embedded with us.
